Today, as when it was first settled, the entirety of the U.S. Empire remains, to its white inhabitants, a frontier. Everywhere, from Bar Harbor to L.A., is treated as unsettled — or barely settled — wilderness. What causes this specter? Certainly not some trans-historical awareness of the initial crimes of U.S. settlement and displacement. Most white citizens barely give a second thought to the Indigenous peoples condemned to mass graves, concentration camps, “reservations,” the fast genocide of the bullet and the slow genocide of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is not the ghost of crimes past, but the presence of crimes still-under-way that causes this frontier mentality, that infects our U.S. garrison-society. In short, it is the presence of the “internal” frontiers of the nationally oppressed peoples that cause this heightened awareness. The government announces it openly when elected officials decry “urban jungles,” “criminal thugs,” and “super predators.”
The fear that underlies the white mind is not a fear of ghost stories or Pet Semetaries, but a real fear, a justified fear, that those who have been economically and socially oppressed — redlined into crumbling apartment blocks, thrown into prisons and jails without remorse or pretense of justice, deprived of legitimate economic opportunities, shunted into under-funded schools, and driven into the lowest, most menial ranks of the U.S. workforce — might dare to rise up against those people who put them there. This fear infects the white mind of the U.S. Empire. It manifests in different ways between the left- and right-fascists. Democrats respond with spineless programs promoting social equality through neoliberal hiring incentives and meaningless moments of “social recognition,” such as donning Kente cloth in the U.S. Senate rather than taking steps to abolish the police state. Republicans and their right-fascist allies have a different strategy: unleashing universal white armament, in which every white man is a deputy and every nationally oppressed person is an outlaw.
In service of that universal armament, the National Police Association and other right-fascists have been working overtime to transform Daniel Penny, the man who murdered Jordan Neely, into a white national hero. The New York City police failed to arrest Penny at the scene of the crime and some media outlets and right-fascist politicians are now calling the killer a “good samaritan.” One of those politicians is the governor of the state of Florida where, in 2020, a local sheriff threatened to “deputize every lawful gun owner” in response to the legitimate outpouring of anger and grief at the murder of George Floyd that became the June Uprisings.
The mentality of the frontier has been played upon for a century by the arms industry. It is precisely this social urge that unites the otherwise incomprehensible positions of the National Rifle Association, namely: against guns in the hands of Black communities, but for guns in the hands of everyone else. In the 19th century this was the open position of the government itself. For instance, the 1856 Supreme Court opinion in Dredd Scott v. Sandford stated, without any ambiguity that if Black people:
were entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race [sic], who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union… the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State. (Emphasis added.)
Dredd Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 417 (1857) (Superseded by Constitutional Amendment (1868)).
Thus, at every turn, the white patriarchs, and those aspiring to the role, have been encouraged to view themselves not as subject citizens of the U.S. Empire, but rather as the embattled homesteaders standing their ground. We cannot know if Penny himself felt this charge to defend white civilization or if he was merely an ex-Marine looking for someone to murder. We can, however, surmise that among his two accomplices (who have gone unnamed by the police or the media) and the other people on the subway car who gave their silent approval to the killing, many felt this satisfaction of defending the frontier. Indeed, social media has been pummeled by the joyous cries of self-proclaimed “feminists” (they are nothing of the kind!) congratulating, or at least excusing, the brutal slaying because they themselves feel threatened by unhoused people like Jordan. These women play, to a T, the part of the homesteader’s wife, congratulating the big strong man with his rifle — or wielding the rifle themselves to protect their “property” from the natives. This is the predictable — and predicted — result of a system that treats Black persons as something other than human, as disposable sources of labor, as farm animals.
In reality, we know that the emancipation of women and the emancipation of the oppressed nations — Black, Indigenous, Latiné — must come together as part of the overall social revolution.The New York courts are, of course, on Penny’s side. Although he was charged with the crime — indeed, the District Attorney could hardly afford not to charge Penny after the NYPD’s riotous and brutal suppression of protests calling for Penny to face justice — he was released on a mere $100,000 bail. The average bail amount for second degree murder in New York is $250,000. First degree murder, which this killing undoubtedly was, has an average bail set at $1 million. We can be certain that the judicial system has no intention of holding Penny accountable. It is likely that, unless the people of New York act to pressure the courts and the D.A. to punish Penny, he’ll be given a plea deal on a low-level assault felony. Indeed, the only way to be certain that Penny sees justice is for the people to mete it out to him themselves.
Only a militant, well-organized people’s movement can get justice for Jordan.
